>> Speaker 1: From the Library of Congress in Washington, DC.
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>> John Cole: Well good afternoon and welcome to the Library of Congress, I'm John Cole, I'm the director of the Library for the Center for the Book which is the reading and literacy promotion arm of the Library of Congress which is involved in a number of national programs that promote books and reading, including the National Book Festival here at the Library of Congress which we have just announced for September 5th in the Washington Convention Center. I hope that you have put this on your calendars. I especially would like to welcome a number of outside visitors today, we're pleased to have you always at the Library of the Congress and of we also hope that someday you'll come back and if you've not had a chance to see our wonderful Jefferson Building which you'll hear about in a minute a little bit more from my cohost, that you'll come back and see the Jefferson Building in all of its 1897 glory. The Center for the Books Program which includes this Books and Beyond Series also works around our country. There are state centers for the book affiliated with each state, each of those works with us to promote books and reading and many of these, the Oklahoma Center for the Book, the Wyoming Center for the Book have special projects that emphasize writers who are coming from that state and the work that they do in those states. All of our programs in the Books and Beyond lecture series of which this is a part, our film for the Library of Congress's website and there will be a short question and answer period I hope towards the end of the talk and we do hope that you participate. But I also must tell you that if you ask a question you are giving permission for your question and to be perhaps as part of our website presentation at a later date. The Books and Beyond Series has been in existence since 1976, we have actually filmed in the neighborhood of 400 talks of authors speaking about books that have a special connection with the Library of Congress. Today's talk has a different and special connection because it is cosponsored between the Center for the Book and the Hebrew Language Table of the Library of Congress. This is the first time that our cosponsor has been one of the language tables and that is a special connection that I would like someone many of you know, Gail Shirazi, who is the current organizer of the Hebrew Language Table to say a few words about the table. Gail is a librarian in the Israel and Judaica section of the Asian and Middle Eastern division. She like me is a 40 year veteran of the Library of Congress and I'd like her to say a few words about the language table and its work in the section in bringing both programs and research materials to the Library of Congress. Gail, would you like to come up? Thank you, let's give her a hand.
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[ Applause ]
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>> Gail Shirazi: Welcome to the program and I want to thank the center for the book, John Cole and Anne Bonny for partnering with us and making this possible. The Hebrew Language Table is one of the many tables under the auspices of the Library of Congress Professional Association, what we call LCPA. We hold classes teaching Hebrew and we hold--sponsor events and programs, including film, lectures, musical events and because of the generosity of many of the filmmakers, authors and performers and program partners, we acquire quite a lot of material through these programs for LC. These items augment our rich collections, including our vast Holocaust collection here at LC. I work in the Israel Judaica section and we're responsible for acquiring materials from Israel and Judaica Hebraic material from the rest of the world. We acquire in all languages, including Hebrew, Arabic, Persian, Amharic, Yiddish and any language spoken or published in Israel. We acquire in all formats, most people think we just have books, we have films, political ephemera, maps, sheet music, DVDs, CDs, political ephemera, including right now we're getting political material from Israel, bumper stickers, buttons, posters. So we collect a wealth of material. We acquire them through purchase, exchange, gifts and transfers and our section they're processed, catalogued and made available to the users, our researchers, our scholars, and to the public. We welcome and love when scholars come, when the general public comes. Please after if you haven't been to our main reading room and to the Jefferson Building this is a perfect opportunity to cross the street and go see our magnificent great hall and to view our wonderful exhibits. A special thanks to Susan Dworkin who's come especially to speak today with us, thank you.
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[ Applause ]
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>> John Cole: Thank you Gail, I should say what Gail has described in terms of the process of acquiring materials in many of the sections of the Library of Congress is repeated in different formats and in different languages as she hinted. And we are really pleased to have the Language Table as a partner because the purpose again of the Books and Beyond is to show that books come out of the Library of Congress that are based on these very important research collections and the published book could not be possible without the research collections, not just at the Library of Congress which, of course, we emphasize, but research libraries everywhere. And it's an important part of Books and Beyond to have a program where you meet the author, you learn a little bit about how the book came about, in this case how it happened to be reissued in a revised edition, and that you have a chance to get a signed copy of the book. This is a pattern that is followed in a much larger scale at the Library of Congress National Book Festival where we want that connection to be made between book, author and the public and again, I hope that you are able to join us this year on September 5th in the Washington Convention Center. It's my pleasure to introduce Susan, our author, along with the international bookseller, The Nazi Officer's Wife, The True Story of Love and Terror in the Third Reich, written with the woman who lived it, Edith Hahn Beer. Susan Dworkin has written a half a dozen books and published 14 books, we're dealing with a very wide range of subjects. They include a biography of Bess Meyerson titled Miss America 1945, Bess Meyerson and the Year that Changed Our Lives, a new novel, The Commons described in the news release as a gripping science-fiction thriller set 150 years from now about an alliance of farmers, plant scientists and a young musician fighting to save the world from starvation, wow [laughter]. And a classic film study Making Tootsie which investigates how Dustin Hoffman, Sidney Pollack, and Jessica Lange made the great comedy of a man who must live for a while as a woman. And several audiobook productions as well, all on topics just as interesting in their own ways. For 10 years Susan was a contributing editor to Ms. Magazine which I think might have been the origins for some of these great ideas later produced as books and as audiobooks. The Nazi Officer's Wife, how one Jewish woman survived the Holocaust, was first published in 1999 and spent more than 20 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller List. The new edition published this month by William Morrow has been updated as Susan will explain with commentary by the author's daughter and by Susan herself. The process is for Susan to present, have time briefly for a question-and-answer with her, and to have a book signing following and we do need to start the book signing no later than 1 o'clock, so John Cole better stop talking and present Susan Dworkin.
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Susan, let's give her a hand.
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[ Applause ]
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>> Susan Dworkin: Thank you John.
>> John Cole: Thank you, here's some water.
>> Susan Dworkin: Okay. Hi everybody, thank you for coming. First I want to say that it's wonderful to have so many old friends and my family here, I'm thrilled at that, I hope you guys get a chance to sit down, somebody should sit in my seat [laughter]. Okay, all right okay. And I want to thank John and Gail and Anne for being such wonderful hosts here at the Library of Congress. I have to tell you it's a great honor for me to be speaking in this grand and glorious place which contains such a vast array of our accumulated history. These days we have to guard all this collection of wisdom and beauty with ferocious zeal because there are people out there who go and take hammers and axes and knock over irreplaceable relics. We are very lucky that our libraries we think are immune to such destroyers because our technology is digital right and everything we write is being recorded and nobody will ever be able to blow it away. So we have to tell that to the Syrians. I am a social historian even when I'm writing fiction and there's an axiomatic kind of quip about history that rolls through my head always, why does history keep repeating itself because we weren't listening hard enough the first time. Listening, listening is the primary job of the writer who sets out to tell someone else's story in that person's own words. The Nazi Officer's Wife which is enjoying an exciting and rather strange spurt of regrowth after 15 years on the bestseller list has taught me how to listen. I listened so hard that Edith Hahn Beer's story changed my life forever and that is what I want to talk to you about today. That surrogate existence of the writer who is the with, the as told to, the amazing experience of sharing the burden, the burden of somebody else's history. About 15 years ago a lawyer contacted me and asked me to come to Washington to meet an old lady at the Holocaust Museum. She was an extraordinary woman he said, a Jewish woman from Vienna who had survived the war by assuming the identity of a Christian friend and hiding in plain sight in the heart of the Reich. Such people he said were called U-boats for they hovered beneath the surface of the nightmare, hidden by an opaque ocean of self-abnegation and fear. And this particular old lady he said had so completely erased herself that she had married a Nazi officer, lived as a dutiful hausfrau, born a child a daughter, the only Jewish child born in a German hospital in 1944. Come and meets her he said, perhaps a book can be written about her story. So I get on a plane and I come to this city to meet Edith. At the time I was living in New Jersey with my late husband and three kids in a very nice suburb, I had already written a number of books with and as told to with well-known people, and I had done my share of straight out ghostwriting for folks whose fame enabled them to serve as spokespeople for causes I believed in and wanted to support. I worked as a journalist interviewing show business celebrities and writing reviews of plays and movies and books and I was also a housewife. If I embraced a career as a ghostwriter it was because it suited me and my schedule as a housewife. I didn't have to travel far, I didn't have to get dressed up, I didn't have to show up for work at 9 o'clock in the morning right. I could drive carpools, I could participate in community events. I prided myself on my ability to invent a dinner for five in 20 minutes, I was the queen of the fish stick [laughter]. I belonged to that traditional generation of women who worked at home and in the marketplace who did it all in order to somehow have it all. A very exhausting existence as many of you will remember. As a feminist whose political consciousness had been shaped by the citizen uprisings of the 60s and 70s, I believe with all my heart in the struggle of the individual for freedom, personal freedom and self-realization. I believed in becoming oneself, in learning and growing and probing and progressing one's self. My heroines were Bella Abzug, a lawyer who had defended the victims of Joe McCarthy's witch hunts before she became a Congresswoman from New York and the maker of speeches which got me off my butt and into the streets to march for women's rights. And my other heroin was Barbara Tuchman whose books shimmer and burn on these shelves all around us, who had late in life become a famous historian transforming our understanding of the First World War and the 13th-century, the perfectly plausible scenarios by which butchery and monumental stupidity might actually annihilate humanity. Why were Edith and I meeting at the Holocaust Museum? Well during the war Edith had written hundreds of letters to her boyfriend in Vienna describing her situation and her fear of being discovered, she was a U-boat. Of course, these letters was supposed to be destroyed, burn them she said, burn them they'll get us all killed, but the boyfriend didn't burn them he kept them and years later when he died his widow found them, they were love letters, they were pain letters. And she packed them up and she sent them off to Edith's family in London. Edith's daughter, Angela, put them together with all the other papers that Edith had, the actual real identity cards, the fake Nazi identity cards, the Russian occupation papers, the snapshots, Edith had a box camera, the snapshots of people whose fate had never actually been known. And the entire archive was offered for sale at Sotheby's in London. Two American veterans of Eisenhower's army bought the archive and donated it to the Holocaust Museum. So Edith was now in Washington for a little reception honoring the establishment of that archive as a phenomenal real historical record of a life which had otherwise been engulfed by silence. Not just Edith's life was in that silence, but others too. Jewish girls who had been conscripted for slave labor in the asparagus fields of Osterberg, ice hearted Nazi bureaucrats, greedy Bergers, heroic factory workers, a handsome young German officer named Werner Vetter, a flighty flirty girl named Christle Denner, a bold and somewhat scandalous Viennese Nazi named Maria Niederall. A whole life of people living and dying and coping in the glare and the shadows of tyranny. So Edith tells me her story, she's a little old lady with a high-pitched voice and I keep trying, let me see if I've got this right, this is how she looked when I met her. I kept trying to imagine her when she was a petite beauty turning heads at the University of Vienna, stylish and sure of herself knowing just where to go in her sophisticated city and a city which she loved and which she was quite sure loved her back. Secure in her power, in her intellect, sure of her future as a lawyer, perhaps even a judge, sure of her mother's advice, her lover's kiss, and her next meal. After our interview Edith went home to Netanya in Israel, which it's a seaside town in Israel where she had settled after the death of her husband in London, the guy the Beer, this Fred Beer. I went home to New Jersey I immediately packed my bags and joined her in Netanya. For weeks and weeks and weeks we talked and talked and talked, she told me and told me and told me and I listened and I listened and listened and when I wasn't absolutely positive I had the whole story, I made her tell it again and again and again and every time she told it again she remembered something new. She remembered a little something.
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And I asked her now not just what happened Edith, but what did you think about what was happening to you, what did you see out the window, who did you trust, why did you trust? I hired a German student to double check Edith's memory of the facts, it was astonishing how well she remembered the facts. But remember she had an archive, we had a written archive to verify everything which made this a very solid memoir. But I sent my student off on trains and planes to check out certain things to make sure, after all Edith was an old lady, she might have remembered something wrong. I hired another young lady, an opera singer, who had studied in Strasburg and was fluent in German to translate all the documents. I invaded Edith's life, I demanded her life, I insisted on every trace of her story and I am not exactly sure when she began to invade my life. When knowing her demanded that I give up my sense of security, my certitude that I would always be able to count on the loyalty of my community and the safety of my children. But that is what happened to me when I began listening hard to the story of Edith Hahn Beer. So here it is briefly, she was in law school, she was in love with another lawyer named Pepi Rosenfeld, he was confident, dashing, prematurely bald and brilliant and she was absolutely crazy about him, I mean these love letters were hot love letters [laughter]. She lives with her two younger sisters and her widowed mother whose name is Klothilde, she's a skilled dressmaker. In those days people didn't go by ready-to-wear right we're talking the 30s in Vienna, clothes were made. Pepi the lover, his mother is also widowed, she is a Christian who converted to marry Pepi's father but it wasn't an especially heartfelt conversion and she was ready and willing to kick it over for any convenience. In fact, nobody in this whole scenario is heartfelt about religion. Edith herself describes her large extended family as Christmas tree Jews. They have a few kosher relatives, but they're not kosher. They have a few Zionist relatives, but they're not Zionist. They are Viennese intellectuals, slightly left of center, very much I began to see like New Yorkers, accustomed to a certain level of anti-Semitism which they lived with and which they tried to ignore and which they called prejudice. She used to laugh, she had a tinkling little old lady [giggle] laugh, she used to say they were born hating us and they lived hating us and we called it prejudice, she said what a euphemism that was. When Germany and Austria became one country, this is the German army assembling in Vienna, Edith's family swiftly tumbled into poverty, their homes were taken, their jobs were taken, her little sister Hansi was no longer allowed to attend school, 14 years old. Edith shows up for her final exam at the university and with real pleasure the registrar says you're not taking any exams here anymore Edith and she throws her out. Scraping together every last nickel Klothilde Hahn manages to get her two younger daughters on a train out of the country for Turkey and for this mysterious Jewish homeland which they thought might exist in Palestine. Edith didn't leave because she was in love with Pepi and his mother said she would kill herself if he left her. Scraping together every last one of her nickels Pepi's mother bribed and begged her way through the Austrian bureaucracy until her half Jewish son was registered as an Aryan Christian. You know I once interviewed the great writer Cynthia Ozick, I hope you have read her books she's a treasure. And she said when you write you inhabit all the characters, the good and the evil, the foreign and the familiar, they are all you and she was right. The more I became Edith the more I became the people around her. I became her mother ready to trade everything she owned for her children's escape and I became Pepi's mother too, loathing his damp Jewish girlfriend, wanting Edith gone out of Pepi's life forever. I became the jolly citizens of Austria cheering Hitler, screaming Sick Heil, sure they would soon own the world. You must understand Edith said, everybody got something from the dispossession of the Jews, an apartment, a piano, a vacated business. You are the second violin in the orchestra now you could be the first violin because suddenly that chair was empty. You owed money to a Jewish merchant forget it you didn't have to pay. You needed help with the harvest because your regular field hands were out conquering France, you got sophisticated Jewish ladies from Vienna to replace them for free. Nobody asked where the Jews had gone Edith said, nobody seemed to care about their absence, everybody just collected what they had left behind. This is an amazing picture of somebody's possessions being put in the truck and taken away. Now that she knew Pepi wouldn't leave with her Edith looked to one of the few remaining ways out which was to go to the British consulate and get a visa to become a governess or a housekeeper in England. The line was very long, very, very long all alongside the desperate Jewish girls there were smiling men who said, I can get out of this place in half an hour, visa, transport everything arranged, soon you will be working as a hostess or a maitre d' or a desk clerk at lovely restaurants and hotels in the beautiful city of Kowloon or Shanghai or Beijing. And some people actually went Edith said, they actually went away with those smiling men that's how desperate they were. So the last chance British housekeeper plan doesn't work and Edith found a job as the tutor of a lively lovely girl named Christle Denner who paid no attention to her studies and loved to chatter about her many boyfriends. She was like a replacement little sister Edith said. The men who took control of the Jews who hadn't gotten out of the Vienna was Adolf Eichmann no less, he summoned them all to line up and be counted in the central square, Edith and her mother stood there in the burning midday sun. Fate brought a truck driven by some Nazi thugs, they grab Edith and Klothilde and they say that's it ladies you are wanted for agricultural labor in the Reich and they get into the truck and Edith, remember Edith who was trained as a litigator goes into courtroom mode and she says basically she says, are you nuts, you want this old lady with her grey hair and her wrinkles? What good is she going to be on a farm, she can barely stand up straight and she's talking and talking and talking and finally, they say okay and they release Klothilde and they put Edith on the truck? And Edith thinks that she has saved her mother. So I ask myself, I'm the as go to here, would I have done that or would I have made a different decision and chosen to pull my mother with me into the truck, would I have had the strength of mind to make any decision at all or would I have just let the moment roll over me which is probably what most people did. Once you start asking yourself these questions you are no longer with the as told to, you are walking in your subject's shoes. Edith worked as a slave laborer in the fields of Osterberg, these pictures were taken with the box camera. The fellow up there in the corner with the cigarette in his mouth is a French prisoner of war, nobody ever knew what happened to him, the Germans called him Franz and there he was in Edith's archive. They were shin deep in the mud, they were chopping asparagus, they were hauling beets, they were hungry, they were freezing, 14 hours a day until they were so thin and hard and starving that they stopped menstruating. Use the wrong toilet the matron would beat you bloody, slip in the field and the foreman would grind your face in the dirt. Edith kept up her hopes and those of her friends, Justice Primo Levy did with Dante by quoting everybody Goethe, to preserve all your power despite everything to never bend and show yourself to be strong brings the might of the Gods to your aid. That's what she posted by her bunk on a little tiny piece of paper at night. She wrote anguished letters to Pepi, do you love me, do you even remember me, do you still love me?
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She wrote lies to her mother, we're fine, we're in good health, I will be home soon she'd say. They sent her to work in the Bestehorn box factory in Aschersleben and it's still there, Bestehorn is a big paper box manufacturer in Germany. First they gave her a quota of 20,000 boxes, then they gave her a quota of 30,000 boxes, it's like a Catch-22 the more you did the more the quota grew. A German woman, a worker with mutilated fingers showed her how to make the blades cut twice as many and twice as fast. And I became listening and listening, I became that lady too. I became the voice in her head that said, don't help these Jewish girls you're going to get into trouble and the voice in the head that made her still go ahead and do it. She helped, it was critical help, would I have had the courage and I wondered. As more and more foreign prisoners arrived to replace them, the Jewish slave girls were sent home for transportation to the East, they call it the Aust. Please come as soon as you can so we can go together Edith's mother wrote and when the SS finally sent Edith back to Vienna, they screwed up the time and her mother was already gone. Now we all know now that the East was the camps in Poland, but at that time in that moment Edith and her mother thought it meant at worst forced resettlement in the wilds of this Polish outback where they would have to learn the language and find a way to make a new life. Klothilde planned to take her sewing machine, presumably even the Pols would need something nice to wear. Edith was supposed to report to the Gestapo in Vienna, she didn't do it. She tore the star very carefully off her coat so it wouldn't leave holes that would show the outline and she reported to Pepi, sure that he would protect her. That he was living in his mother's apartment, he was registered as a Christian, surely he would take her in and hide her, didn't he love her, of course, he loved her. It turned out to be quite a bust and I said to her, how could you have been so foolish and she said, I was in love, I was in love and I was blind and I was young and I was in love. And I pushed myself to remember when I was like that, when I was that young and that crazy about whoever he was [laughter], I too had been ready to risk everything for love at one point. She went homeless and friendless in the city, she said this was the worst time of the whole story. Bathing in public baths when she dared, sleeping in movie theaters, terrified of being recognized after all she was a native Viennese, there were people there who knew her. She sought help everywhere she dared and one by one her sources ran out. One chance remained, Edith's friend, Mina, who was another of the slave girls in Osterberg told her when you get back to Vienna go see a woman named Maria Niederall, she took over the moving company where I used to work Mina said. She is a Nazi, but she's a good person. Could she trust this Niederall woman, did she have a choice but to try? You couldn't really trust anyone she said in her little kitchen in Netanya with her little voice, you had to believe that they were all Nazis and then you had to understand that the good ones could turn you in on a whim and the bad ones could save you just because they didn't feel like calling the Gestapo at that particular moment. Maria Niederall saved Edith, she had joined the party why, because Nazi divorce laws overruled the local Catholic laws and allowed her to marry her lover. She fed Edith and she gave her a safe place to sleep, she sent her to a German officer, a racial affairs officer no less named Johann Plattner [assumed spelling] who was getting ready to go to North Africa, he was all parked who said, okay yes this is what you have to do, you have to find someone to give you a false identity papers, get their identity papers that's what you have to do, bye, bye, I'm on my way to North Africa. [Inaudible] this guy was a major Nazi official, why he did it for Maria Niederall who knows, but she was in her day a pretty scandalous woman. Edith's old student, Christle Denner, this is Christle Denner, Beran was her married name, instantly, instantly agreed. You know, it's funny I once heard a lecture by somebody who said that the people who went along with the Holocaust and aided and abetted the Nazis could always give you reasons why they had to do it, they would have killed my family, they would've taken away my this or that or whatever. The people who struck out against them never could explain why. Christle Denner next explained why, she never hesitated, not for one second. She got herself a little tanned by sitting on the terrace Edith said, so she would look like she had been out sailing. And then off she went to the police station with her blonde hair shining claiming that she had clumsily dropped her papers into the Danube and could she please have a second set. The police captain couldn't resist her, Christle let him take her for a coffee, but then when he wanted to see her again she said well I have a sweetheart in the Africa core or some U-boat or something and she had to be true to her sailor, her soldier or whatever he was. Christle kept one set of papers and she gave the duplicate to Edith. If she had been discovered she would've been disappeared. For this act of courage she is honored as a righteous Gentile at Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Israel. So now Edith has papers declaring that she is Christle Margarethe Denner called Greta, a bona fide Aryan. Since there couldn't be two such girls in Vienna she left immediately with one small suitcase containing a parting gift from Pepi. Remember Pepi is not an evil guy, Pepi is a man caught between two women he loves and he picks his mother, he picks his own safety. This gift from Pepi is a battered book of Goethe's poems, Goethe's poems. Inside the binding he has hidden Edith's Jewish identity papers and her law school transcripts. She takes the book, she gets on the train, she sinks into her coat, she lowers her eyes, she makes her voice soft and her demeanor meek and by the time she gets off the train in Munich she has erased her old self. You remember that quote from--that she says at the beginning in my first slide, now I'm like Dante. I just want to read you the context of that quote because it's about Edith's arrival after that night in Munich. I murdered the personality I was born with and transformed myself from a butterfly back into a Caterpillar. I learned to seek the shadows to prefer silence. In the morning I stood in the station and looked around at the Germans, they seemed just fine, healthy, pink, well-fed, swastika armbands and Hitler's pictures were everywhere, red and white and black banners flooded from the walls and the roofs and the martial music was playing. There was so many pretty laughing women, so many confident decorated soldiers, you could buy every sort of flower and wine and wonderful things to eat, a holiday place this Munich. With high spirit and happy people I thought now I am like Dante, I walk through hell but I am not burning. I wonder to myself if time ever necessitates, would I be able to do that, give up my lifelong obsession with self, with personal improvement and progress and self-expression? How do you bury all that in an overnight train ride from Munich? She found work as a seamstress and later on as a nurse's aide emptying bedpans. Between jobs she had some free days, she went to a museum and there she meets this tall handsome young man named Werner Vetter. He is a gregarious bachelor, a gifted artist with a 4F designation that keeps him out of the fighting, he had a motorcycle accident, he's blind in one eye. He had a good job at the Arado Aircraft Company in Brandenburg where in fact they invented the jet plane and he too had some free days. So they met again and again and again in this museum. He told her she was as beautiful as the paintings, he told her he loved her, he begged her to marry him. She said no she gave him every reason for no, but he persisted, he begged and cajoled and she really liked him. She couldn't bear the idea of getting him into trouble, so she told him the truth. She said I can't be with you because I am a Jew, he said well I haven't exactly been honest with you either because I'm really married [laughter].
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[Inaudible], you know, sometimes you listen to a story and you're on the brink of and then this happens right. He says I also have a four-year-old daughter. Well he got divorced, he was in the middle of a divorce and he married Edith. And so now she's Mrs. Werner Vetter, the perfect German housewife. I could imagine that, me with my fish sticks, I could imagine that but him, go figure out how to become Werner. Werner's first wife, Elizabeth, this is Werner and that's the perfect German, that's not Edith but that's the perfect German housewife. Werner's first wife, Elizabeth, had been tall and strong and sort of Valkyrie type right, with her own opinions and her powerful left hook. When Werner hit her she hit back [laughter]. From Edith he wanted everything that Elizabeth had not given him, good cooking, spotless floors, absolute obedience, cross him and a terrifying temper could flare. He was tall, so he used to come in through the door and she was very short and she would stand on chairs and dust the top edge of the door because he would see if there was dust and he didn't like it, tough. He was also a gifted liar Werner, he would tell his bosses that his mother's house in the Rhineland had been bombed and he had to go to help her and then he would take Edith to Vienna. He even created false papers for Pepi, he was a gifted artist, to keep him out of the draft which grabbed any young man who was a bona fide Aryan which, of course, Pepi was now. He painted scenes of Vienna on scarves for Christle who had opened a little souvenir shop. Was he a lunatic I asked Edith, maybe she said who but a lunatic would marry a Jewish woman in 1942 in Nazi Germany? Did you love him I asked, I suppose I must have loved him she said, after all he saved my life. Myself I concluded that Werner was simply one of the few guys in Hitler's Reich who had a big problem with authority [laughter]. In her kitchen in Brandenburg Edith is like a spy from Margaret Atwood as she writes the Handmaid's Tales, anybody ever read the Handmaid's tales? This is the world that Atwood took that book from, she's an insider recalling the daily life of a woman in a racist sexist society, feed a family from a one pot dinner, make coffee with acorns, never take Hitler's picture off the wall, get that attractive Polish slave laborer to bring you that living room [inaudible] that was abandoned by your old neighbors wherever they are, never listen to the enemy radio it's against the law even though the Russians often put German POWs on the radio and one of them might be your darling son. For Edith there were special instructions, never give a sign of how well-educated you are, how much Goethe you can quote by heart. When Edith gave birth to her own baby, a girl named Angela, she refused the anesthetic fearing it to cause her to blurt out her true identity and the names of her protectors. In the time I noticed that I was hearing more and more French being spoken in the supermarket. The earliest signs of and then subtle immigration. Did the people in Marseille notice that some of their neighbors were sending their children abroad, acquiring apartments in another seaside town on the opposite side of the Mediterranean? Did these new French Israelis know something I needed to learn? Was the beast creeping back? In Edith's story the war turns against Germany, men previously considered 4F were sent to the front and Werner was quickly captured. I have this half comic vision of him raising his hands and immediately surrendering to the Russians. He disappeared into the frozen Siberian prison camps. The Soviet army overran Brandenburg, Edith fled with her baby through the smoldering rubble past mangled bodies, I guess I should [inaudible] well this is a conversation she had with Werner. She hid in a building with her neighbor and their babies while Russian soldiers raped women in the streets. Then suddenly she realized that her building was burning and that the suitcase she had brought from Vienna was about to go up in flames and she started screaming and this Russian soldier who was sure that the suitcase contained jewels and money ran to grab it and he brought it out and he was all excited to open it, it turned out it contained a blue old battered book of Goethe's poems. Edith was overjoyed, the Russian was very disappointed, but she had now her identity back, she could be her old self again, but could she ever be her old self again. Could I ever be my old self again? Seeking non-Nazis to administer their conquest the Russians reviewed Edith's rescued papers and made her a judge in the family court, whamo [phonetic] life changes in a twinkling, they give her a nice apartment, they send her cases involving the civilian victims of war, raped widows and kidnapped children. This was astonishing to me. So many helpless children stolen for their blue eyes and pale hair from Poland and Russia, other children born to lonely German women and slave laborers and stolen back by the invading armies. The idea that somebody could steal my children as a prize of war had never occurred to me and now it truthfully kept me awake in sun shining Netanya. Back in America one of my research assistants told me that her German mother-in-law had died rich in years in a New York hospital. This old lady had come here after the war with her parents when she was 15. Before she died she gathered her American sons and their wives around her and she admitted that when she was 14 she had borne a child for the furor. This was a program called Laban's born by which German girls were recruited to sleep with pure blooded consorts and breed the master race. Find him she whispered to her children, find my first baby. Even I could not imagine being her. Every day Edith begged the Russians to bring Werner home, they said nothing. She petitioned her superiors and they threw her out of their offices and then one night a gaunt gray old man appeared at her door. She wept for joy, she held him close, he had come home years, years before other German prisoners. For her apartment, her job and her restored husband, now the Russians expected her to spy for them on her friends. Edith knew what happened to people who defied them, they would imprison her, they would torture her and they would take her child. She lived in terror again and at home Werner was raging, he wanted to be treated like a hero she said, but there were too many returning heroes and the only job he could get was cleaning the streets. And where was his sweet shy little Grete who dusted the top of the doors, his meek little wife what had happened to her was this woman in judicial robes with people pleading for her attention. This woman who wore lipstick and spoke with confidence, she was a stranger to him and he didn't even want to look at their little girl. For the first and only time Edith stood up to him, I am not Grete anymore she cried, you cannot have a slave anymore like the farmers and Mr. Bestehorn, I am Edith Hahn from Vienna, an educated Jewish woman, I am myself, I am who I am. And their divorce happened swiftly because of her connection to the family court. A postcard from a surviving cousin told her that her sister, her little sister, Hansi, had been fighting with the Jewish brigade in the English army and she had married an Englishman and moved to London. And Edith found a British soldier who connected them and soon she escaped from the Russians and she and her daughter fled to England. In the years to come she would send Angela faked greeting cards from her murdered relatives, so the child who was now a little English girl would believe that she had a large devoted family and she always spoke of Werner Vetter with respect and love. I survived because of luck she said and because a few decent people helped me. I have often thought if just a few people had helped every Jew maybe there would have been no Holocaust.
^E00:49:35
^B00:49:41
There's a lyric from a Broadway show called Newsies, it's funny how things come to you from such odd places. And the lyric says courage does not erase our fears, courage is how we face our fears. That's the lyric that speaks for Edith.
^M00:49:58
She was always afraid, she was always honest about her failures of courage, she accepted the protection of Werner Vetter, she baptized her daughter, of course, she said Heil Hitler in the Nazi hospital, but when the beast was at the door she talked her mother off that truck, she tore off the yellow star, she told the truth to Werner, she never gave in and spied for Russians. Not for one moment during the co-writing of this book did I stop asking myself, what would I have done? I traveled with her through those waters of self-abnegation and fear where the U-boat lives, I channeled her terrors, I took them inside me for better or worse, and they inhabit me now. Her personal story has become a hinge on the door by which I enter the morning news and regard the events of our global day-to-day. All is colored, all is illuminated by Edith. I understand that self-fulfillment is a blessing given to very few in this uncertain world and that it can be cut off and erased in a twinkling. Never again will I expect heroism from ordinary people. Never again will I be surprised at its sudden random appearance. I write my own books now, my characters specialize in political awakening. I just wrote a novel called The Comments About the Perils of Burying the Past of the Planet and Destroying its Relics and Ignoring its Clear and Present Danger. I write about the insanity of not listening and forcing the lesson to be repeated. I'm not so free and easy as I was before the Nazi Officer's Wife and maybe that's not such a bad thing, maybe that is exactly what it takes to accept the true burden of history. Thank you.
^M00:51:58
[ Applause ]
^M00:52:13
[ Inaudible Comment ]
^M00:52:14
John asked me to tell you that the new edition of the book which is just going to come out has a few things at the end which it's exactly the same book except there's some things about what happened all the people like Werner Vetter married seven times, looking for that perfect hausfrau that he had for a couple of years during the war. And other things like that, what happened to Maria, what happened to Christle, what happened to all those characters. Also, there's some questions which they've added for book groups, you know, discussion questions and some comments from Angela who had a very interesting and as you can imagine, very complicated relationship with her mother. Anyway, that's that, but if there are any questions or comments I'd be happy to. Yes.
>> Speaker 2: Has this been translated and in German and other languages and have you gone to speak in Germany and how--if so, how is your book received?
>> Susan Dworkin: The book has sold about 150,000 copies in Germany and Austria and I've never been there, my children have been.
^M00:53:23
[ Inaudible Comment ]
^M00:53:24
No, I've never been there. I was going to go like every time I get the I don't know and it's been very successful in France. It's been translated into about two dozen languages, Japanese, Chinese, Czech, Norwegian, you know. So it's--yes, yes.
^M00:53:45
[ Inaudible Comment ]
^M00:53:48
Yes, it's sad to say, a French producer some years ago tried to produce the movie and he had what they call an options, he sort of rented the rights which gives you the right to try and produce it with a certain time and then you can pay some more money and rent it some more and then you pay some more and when it gets to be about 10 years they call it option hell. So it was in option hell for 10 years and thank God that era has ended and if you want to make a movie it's all yours, it's all yours. You be in touch with me or anybody and you will find all the details. Yes.
>> Speaker 3: How did Edith respond to your book when she read it?
>> Susan Dworkin: Good question, Edith was never thrilled to be honest with my pushing and probing, pushing and probing, would you be, would you be? I can't remember, all right let me think, you know, it was a lot of that. And when the book finally--when I finally showed her the manuscript she was very pleased with it she was. But the process was very hard on her, she was elderly at the time and she had, you know, her mother by the way, her mother, why didn't she name Angela for her mother because she was sure her mother was still alive and you don't want to name, you know, the Jewish people named for someone who is dead. And it turned out that Klothilde Hahn was massacred along with thousands of other people about six days after she was taken by the SS near Minsk. Anybody else? Oh yes.
>> Speaker 4: Is she still alive [inaudible]?
>> Susan Dworkin: No she died in 2009, died in 2009. It was a huge obituary, that's another thing that's in the new boo, the obituary from the London Times.
^M00:55:43
[ Inaudible Comment ]
^M00:55:45
Excuse me at what age, 90 something. Yes.
>> Speaker 5: I assume that you [inaudible] this book in English [inaudible]?
>> Susan Dworkin: Yes, only in English, but to tell you the truth my opera singer from Strasburg who had studied German in Strasburg was very, very helpful because there were certain things that you really needed to understand in German and sometimes I couldn't get it from Edith and so I had this this intermediary who really spoke perfect German and would get all the subtleties of art criticism and things like that. Yes here.
>> Speaker 6: I have two questions. One, where did Angela actually end up settling living and the other is the photographs that you were talking about the [inaudible], etcetera those are now at the Holocaust Museum?
>> Susan Dworkin: Yes, they are.
>> Speaker 6: Here in DC?
>> Susan Dworkin: Yes, here in DC.
>> Speaker 6: And are they on display or?
>> Susan Dworkin: I think that you have to contact the, you know, they were on display, but they arrived there 15 years ago. So other things may be on display by now, but I'm sure if you contact them you will find the whole thing and your second question?
>> Speaker 6: Those were the two.
>> Susan Dworkin: Okay.
>> Speaker 6: [Inaudible] Angela, where was Angela [inaudible]?
>> Susan Dworkin: Angela, Angela went to find her father. That was certainly in the cards and she fell in love with a German while she was in Germany and married him and is now divorced from him, she has three kids. The other little daughter, remember Werner's little daughter, Berabel [assumed spelling], her name was Berabel. She married an Englishman, a Scotsman and moved somewhere to the Hebrides and never looked back, so go figure, go figure. Each of those daughters married into the enemy camp in the search for some kind of self-realization and self-understanding and they stated, I think they did stay in touch. You know, Edith stayed in touch with these people. Yes.
>> Speaker 7: Whatever happened to Pepi?
>> Susan Dworkin: Pepi became a bureaucrat in the Austrian postwar Austrian government and he never burned those letters. If he had burned those letters as he had been told, if they had been found those letters, Christle Werner, think Maria, all the people who had been helpful and not to speak of Edith, of course, would have been gone, they would have been destroyed and everybody they knew. And he took such a chance, but he kept them.
>> Speaker 8: But because of that they have a historical [inaudible]?
>> Susan Dworkin: That's right.
>> Speaker 8: And they continue to exist.
>> Susan Dworkin: That's right.
>> Speaker 8: So again, it's like the [inaudible] book you started to talk about.
>> Susan Dworkin: That's right, when I was working on the book the editor at William Morrow said to me, oh there are all these names of these people in the [inaudible] in the slave labor camp, can't we cut some of these names out? And I said, no we can't cut them because nobody knows what happened to them. They just disappeared, so maybe somebody will find them by seeing them in the book and we kept them all.
>> John Cole: Two more--two more questions.
>> Susan Dworkin: This gentleman I think here had his hand up, oh okay.
>> Speaker 9: So how did you [inaudible]?
>> Susan Dworkin: As I tried to explain at the beginning, a lawyer who was known to--that was one cousin of the family, a lot of them, they had 30 people in the family I think were murdered, but there was one cousin who went east through Russia, through China and ended up in San Francisco. And the San Francisco family I think knew this lawyer and that was the lawyer who called me. I don't think I was the first choice, I think there were other writers ahead of me and for some reason it didn't work out.
>> John Cole: One more question, somebody. Well thank you very much Susan.
>> Susan Dworkin: Thank you.
>> John Cole: Let's give Susan another round of applause [applause].
>> Susan Dworkin: Thank you you've been a wonderful audience, thank you very much [applause].
>> John Cole: Well thanks to Susan we've had a wonderful experience together, she really has told the story well and your concepts and your perceptions have added so much to it.
^M01:00:00
I'm glad you got that job and we are now going to have a chance to have the book signed. There's some of the afterlife, some of what has happened subsequently to the people in story is part of the back of the book, so you may want to take a look there. Susan will sit at this table on the side and there are a few books left if you'd like to purchase one and thanks for joining us and let's give our author Susan Dworkin another round of applause [applause].
>> Speaker 1: This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress, visit us@LOC.gov.